Newsroom staff at The Plain Dealer are bracing for major layoffs but a new labor agreement indicates the newspaper plans to be publishing for some time.Robert L. Smith, The Plain Dealer

CLEVELAND, Ohio -- Unionized newsroom employees at The Plain Dealer endorsed an agreement Tuesday that softens the blow of upcoming layoffs and gives management more staffing flexibility for a new and anxious online era.

Fifty-eight reporters, photographers, artists and researchers will lose their jobs beginning in May as the union shrinks from 168 journalists to 110. The agreement minimizes future layoffs for the Newspaper Guild and provides job guarantees through 2019.

The shape of the news operation remains a question. The publication strategy of The Plain Dealer, and whether it will remain a home-delivered daily, was not part of negotiations.

Terrance Egger, publisher of The Plain Dealer, said the agreement gives the company the latitude it needs to move assertively into an era where news is delivered across a variety of platforms.

"It give some certainty to the Guild," he said, "but it also gives the entire company and the Cleveland market the flexibility to be able to deal with a rapidly changing digital future."

Egger said no decisions have been reached for the publishing schedule of The Plain Dealer, which is owned by Advance Publications of New York.

In recent months, Advance has announced plans to end daily home delivery in many of the markets where it owns the major newspaper, including New Orleans, Syracuse, N.Y., and Harrisburg, Pa. Others newspapers have made similar moves, moving toward an online-first strategy as print advertising has declined and readers have shifted toward electronic news.

Hoping to preserve the daily publication, the Guild last month launched a "Save The Plain Dealer" campaign, asking readers and community leaders to voice their support.

"At this point, candidly, we will begin in earnest a more full planning process," Egger said. "We've seen what happened in other [Advance] markets. The final plan for the Cleveland market hasn't been determined yet.

"There's no set timeline," he added. "But I would say in the next two or three months we should know."

Guild leaders were not optimistic the newspaper would survive as a daily or that quality will be a hallmark of the new approach.

"We are going to see a greatly diminished news staff," said Harlan Spector, a Plain Dealer reporter and president of Local One of the Northeast Ohio Newspaper Guild. "I think it will have a devastating impact on our ability to cover the community as it deserves to be covered."

The agreement, which Guild members approved by secret ballot Tuesday afternoon, replaces a no-layoff pledge that had protected Guild jobs for 3½ years. In exchange for that job security, Guild members in 2009 accepted a 12 percent pay cut.

As part of the new agreement, which extends a current collective bargaining agreement, about 8 percent of the lost pay will be restored and the company will contribute more money to the Guild's health and pension plans.

The company also agreed to bolster its severance offering to laid-off workers, in part, by extending health care coverage for a period of time. After the 35 percent staff reduction, the Guild will face just one more modest downsizing over the next six years.

The company, meanwhile, gained flexibility it says it needs. Under the agreement, work can flow freely between The Plain Dealer and cleveland.com, an affiliate owned by Advance. Most significantly, the stories of non-union staff working for cleveland.com can be published in The Plain Dealer.

"This agreement ensures the Guild perseveres into the future, at least the foreseeable future," said Rollie Dreussi, the executive secretary of the newspaper guild. "While we're saddened by the loss of members, from the union standpoint, we did the best we could to take care of them."

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